Okay, I've given the paper a quick reading. There's a lot to be said but I'll give my initial thoughts: it's basically the same as we've seen from Timm before:
- some interesting observations on the similarity of words;
- a wild launch into the auto-copying hypothesis.
I would have a lot more time and respect for the observations about the similarity and co-occurrence of words in the Voynich text were they not continually served up with the same old theory. You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view. basically still stands, which is why I can't accept the conclusions of this paper.
I'll illustrate my problems briefly, with a few quotes from this year's attempt:
Quote:After all, the original VMS was not created by a computer program; the scribe had complete freedom to implement random personal esthetic preferences, spontaneous impulses, or even idiosyncrasies.
Yeah, but he didn't. He stuck to the "same rigid word structure" for the majority of the text. Even though the text likely took weeks, and possibly months or even years, to create. The differences between the word structure from beginning to end are not very great. He
knew what the word structure was, inside his head.
Quote:An exact reproduction of all of his/her mental rules is not only most likely impossible, but would still leave the problem of unpredictable random (esthetic) decisions.
Basically, the writer's mind is a "black box": we're not allowed to look in and understand what's going on. The writer used the rules he wanted, when he wanted, or didn't if he wanted not to. Nothing is remotely satisfying about this kind of explanation.
Quote:The scope of this work is not the “elemental deconstruction” of the VMS to an exact (and complete) set of rules. We rather demonstrate the feasibility to algorithmically create a text as rich and complex as the VMS, using the strikingly simple self-citation method.
Modelling the text is not the same as explaining it, which I think the authors of the paper understand. But they
really need to understand it: just saying what the structure looks like, and creating a computer program to recreate it, lack the kind of explanatory power needed to draw final conclusions. It can be informative and illustrative, but not definitive.
Quote:Of course, it is possible to pinpoint quantitative differences between the real VMS and the used facsimile text (most likely any facsimile text). An example is the quantitative deviation of the <q>-prefix distribution from the original VMS text. However, we are not aware of any statistical property of the VMS that qualitatively contradicts our proposed self-citation algorithm.
The text doesn't account for You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view. They're not even present as far as I can see. I think that is a qualitative failure of the algorithm.
Quote:Following Occam’s principle, this theory provides the optimal hypothesis available to explain all facts currently known about the VMS.
It's really uncool to wheel this out, you know? Cause everybody thinks they have this weapon in their arsenal. I mean, Occam's Razor says the text is a text: simpler solutions are more likely to be correct than complex ones. Doesn't it? (Don't argue against this point, just accept that it's a silly thing to put in a paper.)